This year I finally got a pool. But joining the leisure class has its drawbacks

This spring, as workers dug a swimming pool in my backyard, I imagined myself adrift on an inflatable chaise or just gazing out at the Barbicide-blue water, my days passing in a flip-flopped, tank-topped bliss.

Two months later, I sometimes feel like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard floating facedown in the pool with a bullet in his back. "The poor dope," he says, narrating from the afterlife. "He always wanted a pool. Well, in the end, he got himself a pool."

Except that I didn't really want a pool. I never thought I was the kind of person who should own...